The Empire of Ice Cream (35 page)

August walked the entire mile and a half from Larchcroft's estate into town, and when he arrived at the office of the
Gazette
, he found it already abuzz with the day's activity. Because of the interview he now carried in his notebook, he felt none of the usual hesitancy in approaching his boss. He rapped on the old man's office door, and a gruff voice commanded him to enter.

“Where were you last night?” asked the editor. There were dark pouches beneath his eyes, and what hair he possessed was askew with wispy eruptions. It was unusual for him to be seen without jacket and tie, but August noticed both were missing. His white shirt was rumpled and ink-stained; one sleeve turned up in a sloppy cuff as the other was turned down and unbuttoned.

“I had the interview with Larchcroft,” said August. “I'm sure you'll want it for the front page.”

The boss shook his head, his expression grim. “Sorry, kid, but you've been trumped.”

“What do you mean?” asked August.

“Early in the evening last night, just after dark, a young woman was murdered in town. The third floor of a dump over on Paine Street. The Windsor Arms. Nobody was around, I couldn't find you, so I had to go. Brutal. Somebody opened a hole in this girl's head, right here, and poured in a pint of India ink,” said the old man, pointing to the center of his forehead. “Blood everywhere.”

August sat slowly down in the chair across the desk from his boss. “What was the girl's name?” he asked.

“May Lofton. We don't know much more about her yet.”

“Was she a schoolteacher?” asked August.

“She might have been. She definitely didn't seem to be the type to frequent a place like that. Why, you know her?”

“No.”

“The constable found something interesting near the body, though. Maybe they'll catch the killer …” The editor closed his eyes and stretched. “I could fall asleep right now. Anyway, what did you get?”

August reached across the desk to lay his notebook in front of the editor and then sat back into his chair. “This still might make the front page,” said August. “A long and detailed recounting, basically a confession from the Man of Light.”

The editor sat up straight and leaned over the desk, drawing the notebook to him. He yawned wearily, opened the cover, and flipped past the first few blank pages. A moment passed, and then his eyes fiercely focused, as if what he was reading had fully awoken him. He turned two pages. “Fascinating,” he said. “You see this?” He lifted the open notebook and turned it to August.

The young man's jaw dropped and the color drained from his face as the editor flipped slowly through the pages for him. Each and every page he'd committed the interview to was covered from top to bottom, side to side, with pitch-black, not the least speck of white showing.

The editor cocked his head to the side and paused before speaking. “I guess you know the clue the constable found with the dead girl was a sheet of paper, like this, but instead of writing, it was completely black.”

August wanted to protest his innocence but found himself suddenly speechless due to an unfounded yet overwhelming sense of guilt. The editor's bleak stare seemed to drill straight into him, while outside the sky had darkened even more than was usual for a winter's day. Feeling the night closing in on him, he stood, turned, and fled the office. The editor yelled behind him for his other workers to stop the young reporter. Still August managed to escape their clutches and the confines of the
Gazette
. Outside, an angry crowd pursued, following him to the riverbank, where they found his discarded clothes, and later, at dusk, after searching all day, his lifeless, frozen body, pale as the light of the moon.

A Man of Light

Story Notes

The idea for this story came from a visit to my friend Barney, who is a painter and an alternative comics artist (see “Coffins on the River”). I was visiting him in his studio one day, and while we were looking at his latest paintings and shooting the breeze, two things conspired to later give me the beginning idea for this story. The first was that he had just finished a painting for a Halloween show at a local gallery. The picture was sort of a takeoff on a work by an Early American painter, Charles Willson Peale, of a man ascending a staircase and looking back over his shoulder. Perhaps you've seen it; it's very famous. What Barney did was create a similar figure, carrying a cane, also ascending a staircase. The difference was that only the figure's head, gloves, socks, and shoes were rendered. Because of the manner in which he'd placed the figure, the green wallpaper behind seemed at first to be a green suit the man was wearing. On closer inspection, it was evident that the suit was an illusion and there was only the green wall. It was a very cool effect, and I laughed when I realized how my eyes had initially duped me. The face of the man on the stairs was very forbidding, and I told Barney that it looked like Ray Milland sniffing shit. He said, “Sort of, but you know who it really looks like?” “Who?” I asked. “Tell me that doesn't look like John Ashcroft,” he said. And, man, I'll be damned if it didn't. He told me he hadn't intended for the figure to look like anyone, it just came out that way. A little while after that, we were looking at another painting of his, and I told him I liked the way the light shone in it. He said, “I'm the man of light,” and then proceeded to tell me about some popular contemporary painter who billed himself as “The Man of Light.” The guy painted these saccharine-sweet landscapes and added painted light to them in any amount the customer wanted. Barney said this artist had stores in malls and had become a franchise. From these two things, the initial idea of “A Man of Light” was born. I was going to call the character in the story Ashcroft, but I figured that would have made it a political allegory, so I changed the name to Larchcroft. There was actually another story Barney told me that day that I tried to work into my tale, but I found it really had no place. He kept all of his drawings and comics in this flat file he had in his studio. I'd asked him about some old drawing he'd done years back, and he nodded toward the flat file and said, “What's left of it is in there.” I said, “What do you mean, ‘what's left of it'?” He told me that mice had gotten in the file and ate through a lot of his work and crapped all over it. “When I'm out here late at night, I hear them chewing through it,” he said. “That sucks,” I said. “No great loss,” he told me. “Strange thing is, some of the drawings they eat to smithereens and some they won't touch.” “Why?” I asked. “Even the mice are critics,” he said. “I've been meaning to compare the ones they've left with the one's they've chewed. I think they're trying to tell me something.”

Ellen Datlow published this story on SCIFICTION. Luckily, in publishing it on the web, the mice couldn't touch it. Some readers gave it a pretty good chewing, though
.

The Green Word

On the day that Moren Kairn was to be executed, a crow appeared at the barred window of his tower cell. He lay huddled in the corner on a bed of foul straw, his body covered with bruises and wounds inflicted by order of the king. They had demanded that he pray to their God, but each time they pressed him, he spat. They applied the hot iron, the knife, the club, and he gave vent to his agony by cursing. The only thing that had prevented them from killing him was that he was to be kept alive for his execution.

When he saw the crow, his split lips painfully formed a smile, for he knew the creature was an emissary from the witch of the forest. The black bird thrust its head between the bars of the window and dropped something small and round from its beak onto the stone floor of the cell. “Eat this,” it said. Then the visitor cawed, flapped its wings, and was gone. Moren held out his hand as if to beg the bird to take him away with it, and for a brief moment, he dreamed he was flying out of the tower, racing away from the palace toward the cool green cover of the trees.

Then he heard them coming for him, the warder's key ring jangling, the soldiers' heavy footsteps against the flagstones of the circular stairway. He ignored the pain of his broken limbs, struggled to all fours, and crept slowly across the cell to where the crow's gift lay. He heard the soldiers laughing and the key slide into the lock as he lifted the thing up to discover what it was. In his palm he held a round, green seed, the likes of which he had never before seen. When the door opened, so did his mouth, and as the soldiers entered, he swallowed the seed. No sooner was it in his stomach than he envisioned a breezy summer day in the stand of willows where he had first kissed his wife. She moved behind the dangling green tendrils of the trees, and when a soldier spoke his name it was in her voice, calling him to her.

With a gloved hand beneath each arm, they dragged him to his feet, and he found that his pain was miraculously gone. The noise of the warder's keys had somehow become the sound of his daughter's laughter, and he too laughed as they pulled him roughly down the steps. Outside, the midsummer sunlight enveloped him like water, and he remembered swimming beneath the falls at the sacred center of the forest. He seemed to be enjoying himself far too much for a man going to his death, and one of the soldiers struck him across the back with the flat side of a sword. In his mind, though, that blow became the friendly slap of his fellow warrior, the archer Lokush. Moren had somehow forgotten that his best bowman had died not but a week earlier, along with most of his other men, on the very field he was now so roughly escorted to.

The entirety of the royal court, the knights and soldiers and servants, had gathered for the event. To Kairn, each of them was a green tree and their voices the wind rippling through the leaves of that human thicket. He was going back to the forest now, and the oaks, the alders, the yews parted to welcome him.

The prisoner was brought before the royal throne and made to kneel.

“Why is this man smiling?” asked King Pious, casting an accusatory glance at the soldiers who had accompanied the prisoner. He scowled and shook his head. “Read the list of grievances and let's get on with it,” he said.

A page stepped forward and unfurled a large scroll. Whereas all in attendance heard Kairn's crimes intoned—sedition, murder, treachery—the warrior heard only the voice of the witch, chanting the beautiful poetry of one of her spells. In the midst of the long list of charges, the queen leaned toward Pious and whispered, “Good lord, he's going green.” Sure enough, the prisoner's flesh had darkened to a deep hue the color of jade.

“Finish him before he keels over,” said the king, interrupting the page.

The soldiers spun Moren Kairn around and laid his head on the chopping block. From behind the king stepped a tall knight encased in gleaming red armor. He lifted his broadsword as he approached the kneeling warrior. When the deadly weapon was at its apex above his neck, Kairn laughed, discovering that the witch's spell had transformed him into a seedpod on the verge of bursting.

“Now,” said the king.

The sharp steel flashed as it fell with all the force the huge knight could give it. With a sickening slash and crunch of bone, Kairn's head came away from his body and rolled onto the ground. It landed, facing King Pious, still wearing that inscrutable smile. In his last spark of a thought, the warrior saw himself, a thousandfold, flying on the wind, returning to the green world.

All but one who witnessed the execution of Moren Kairn that day believed he was gone for good and that the revolt of the people of the forest had been brought to an end. She, who knew otherwise, sat perched in a tree on the boundary of the wood two hundred yards away. Hidden by leaves and watching with hawklike vision, the witch marked the spot where the blood of the warrior had soaked into the earth.

Arrayed in a robe of fine purple silk and wearing his crown of gold, King Pious sat by the window of his bedchamber and stared out into the night toward the tree line of the forest. He had but an hour earlier awakened from a deep sleep, having had a dream of that day's execution—Kairn's green flesh and smile—and called to the servant to come and light a candle. Leaning his chin on his hand and his elbow on the arm of the great chair, he raked his fingers through his white beard and wondered why, now that he had successfully eradicated the threat of the forest revolt, he could not rest easily.

For years he had lived with their annoyance, their claims to the land, their refusal to accept the true faith. To him they were godless heathens, ignorantly worshiping trees and bushes, the insubstantial deities of sunlight and rain. Their gods were the earthbound, corporeal gods of simpletons. They had the audacity to complain about his burning of the forest to create new farmland, that his hunting parties were profligate and wasted the wild animal life for mere sport, that his people wantonly fished the lakes and streams with no thought of the future.

Had he not been given a holy edict by the pontiff to bring this wild territory into the domain of the church, convert its heathen tribes, and establish order amidst this demonic chaos? All he need do was search the holy scripture of the Good Book resting in his lap and in a hundred different places he would find justification for his actions. Righteous was his mission against Kairn, whom he suspected of having been in league with the devil.

Pious closed the book and placed it on the stand next to his chair. “Be at ease, now,” he murmured to himself, and turned his mind toward the glorious future. He had already decided that in midwinter, when what remained of the troublesome rabble would be hardest pressed by disease and hunger, he would send his soldiers into the maze of trees to ferret out those few who remained and return them to the earth they claimed to love so dearly.

As the candle burned, he watched its dancing flame and decided he needed some merriment, some entertainment to wash the bad taste of this insurrection from his palate. He wanted something that would amuse him, but also increase his renown. It was a certainty that he had done remarkable things in the territory, but so few of the rulers of the other kingdoms to the far south would have heard about them. He knew he must bring them to see the extraordinary palace he had constructed, the perfect order of his lands, the obedience of his subjects.